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America's Technical Debt
Funksaw writes: An article by Brian Boyko in Equal Citizens, Lawrence Lessig's blog dealing with issues of institutional corruption in democratic politics, explains why, specifically, this reform movement needs (more) people with technical minds and technical skills.
Quoting: "What we need are more people willing to look at the laws of this country based on their function. And when I use the word 'function,' I mean very specifically the same sense that a computer programmer means it. (Because lord knows, government isn't functioning by any other definition.) ... It's not just that big money politics is being injected [like a code injection] into the function of democracy. It's also that the function of democracy can be warped by an injection. Stopping the injection of money into our democratic function still leaves the function vulnerable to the same — or similar — injection attack.... We need people who can solve the problems of politics like a programmer solves problems in computer code, because a democratic system with vulnerabilities is a democratic system that can fail or be made to fail."
The author is the technical adviser to the New Hampshire Rebellion and Mayday.US, two of Lessig's major reform projects.
Quoting: "What we need are more people willing to look at the laws of this country based on their function. And when I use the word 'function,' I mean very specifically the same sense that a computer programmer means it. (Because lord knows, government isn't functioning by any other definition.) ... It's not just that big money politics is being injected [like a code injection] into the function of democracy. It's also that the function of democracy can be warped by an injection. Stopping the injection of money into our democratic function still leaves the function vulnerable to the same — or similar — injection attack.... We need people who can solve the problems of politics like a programmer solves problems in computer code, because a democratic system with vulnerabilities is a democratic system that can fail or be made to fail."
The author is the technical adviser to the New Hampshire Rebellion and Mayday.US, two of Lessig's major reform projects.
We already have technicians who work with the law, they're called lawyers and their very technical sophistication is what enables a lot of the clusterfuckery which takes place. Creating and finding loopholes, manipulation of the legal process, etc. And they also write the rules in very technical language, enabling a kind of only-we-understand-it monopoly control.
Maybe what we need is more non-technicians to eliminate the technical meddling.
As a Nation, we are corrupt, greedy, adulterous, full of lies and cursing and hatred, ignorant of the woes around us (or at least more concerned about inconveniences at home), and always ready to break covenants, yet we expect our democratically elected & representative politicians to have the exact opposite character.
Just from the federalist papers #51
" If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions."
Going to need omniscience to figure out what the functionality will be of changed laws, and a whole lot of arrogance to think the "Selfless" people doing this for the greater good won't be bought off faster and cheaper than any congress critter ever could
he ended the war in Iraq as quickly as reasonable,...
Have you read the news about what is going on in Iraq lately? That looks an awful lot like the war hasn't ended.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Dude, it's grammar, not a super-logical recursive function run by computers.
In the ACA case the Judges ruled that a Federal exchange set up in lieu of a state exchange was the logical equivalent of an "exchange set up by the state." This is no more irrational then telling your houseguest he can borrow the diesel car or the gasoline motorbike as long as he tops up the diesel, and expecting him to know you meant he fill up the bike with gasoline.
There's a reason multiple states chose to use the Federal Exchange, despite the fact that Conservative orthodoxy holds that made subsidies to their residents illegal.